Living with Secondary Breast Cancer: Surgery and afterwards

Finished chemo in July with the 12th of September booked for my Mastectomy with lymph node clearance, my breast surgeon was and is amazing, I am in awe of the man, my operation went very well and due to the chemo working so beautifully and shrinking everything down he told me he had clear margins and out of the 13 nodes taken out only one was infected. Once you have spread its down to whether it is in your best interests to perform the operation, technically its already spread so some might argue that its spread so what is the point in removing the primary tumour, I think its a personal choice and I choose to have the primary removed, I now know that the mother lump has gone and only a few of her kids are left on my lungs all be it that they are now tiny and stable, I love those two words tiny and stable. I can concentrate on trying to get rid of the mets on my lungs.

Back to the operation I woke up to find the wonderful nurses taking good care of me and did not feel a thing. Ok I was still coming round from the anaesthetic but I never felt better (relieved that the mother was gone). My operation had gone well but my breast surgeon told me that he had to dissect quite a lot of muscle tissue in my armpit when taking the lymph nodes out and due to this my drains would not stop, I lost a lot of blood and was nearly going to have a blood transfusion, however I remedied this by getting my partner to bring in some watercress/nettle soup and beetroot juice (I'd made this before going into hospital and had some in the freezer) (hospital food lives up to its reputation of being really bad) after 8 days in hospital this combo helped plump my bloods up and enabled me to be discharged. I had a seroma (build up of fluid) on my mx (mastectomy) site which made doing the exercises quite difficult although I made sure to use the affected arm as much as I could and walked round the ward, its always better to get up and move about I think it helps with the healing. The mx site was and is still numb I have been informed that this is due to the nerves being taken away and nerves don't knit back together they kind of re route themselves but this takes time and may never happen, I don't feel any discomfort its just numb. My scar is very thin and low down so it does not show, my breast were very small I was not offered a reconstruction straight away due to having secondaries (mets to lungs) they did not want to stress my body out anymore than it needed to be and to have a recon. would of meant that I would of been in surgery for a lot longer, they did not want to take that risk with me. However my breast surgeon told me that if I am stable for a long period of time they would perform a reconstruction. I'm still not sure about more surgery and really don't care about what I look like, vanity is the last thing on my mind.
Tips for surgery include:

Go to the toilet before you get anaesthetised otherwise you could wake up with no pants on like one of the other ladies on my ward who had a full bladder that was emptied upon being anaesthetised.
Take PJ's in with you ones that open up at the front for ease of access.
Make some healthy soup and freeze it ready to be heated up and put in a thermos flask and brought into hospital. (I cannot stress how glad I am that I did this)
ipods are good to while away the time.
Good book or magazine and plenty of visitors really helps.
Keep your bloods up (otherwise they wont let you leave).
Walk about get moving.

When I got home I was extremely fatigued and realised that I was anaemic and very weak found out that my bloods were 8.3 and normal bloods would be around the 12 mark, so in order to get my bloods up I cooked liver (first time since I was a kid) with onions and that sorted me out. Basically keep doing the exercises but rest when you feel the need.